[cute_boi]

I dont know why you are being downvoted but yes minks are caged just so celebrity/rich people can show off their shiny fur based cloths. And later they blame minks is a threat lol.

Human spread-ed them virus, tortured for whole life, killed them mercillesly and now minks are thread? Common just wear faux based clothing and problem solved.

[tasty_freeze]

My mother and father were born in 1930. Being from that era, my mother always wanted a mink coat because it would mean she had "made it", but it wasn't until they were about 60 and all the kids were grown and out of college that my dad bought one for her birthday.

She wore it once and was so self-conscious that people would think her callous that it stayed in the closet until she died 20 years later.

[ornornor]

> She wore it once and was so self-conscious that people would think her callous that it stayed in the closet

Good.

[sam_goody]

Well, that problem is solved, but there are new ones.

Once no one needs minks for coats, they just wipe them out as nuisances, making them endangered or extinct. As it is, I believe the mink has been eradicated from many parts of the world.

Now, we may not need mink. But at least making coats from them mean they will be around.

[foogazi]

> But at least making coats from them mean they will be around.

Being around means nothing to the individual minks being caged and slaughtered

[jfk13]

"Being around" as a farmed animal may bear little relation to being around as a free, wild creature. Given a few generations, we tend to turn the animals we farm into a parody of the original creature. How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?

[rapnie]

> How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?

This was tested in a Dutch TV program some years ago ("Keuringsdienst van waarde") where they got some newborn battery chickens and placed them on a regular farm, amongst healthy free-roaming chickens. They got the same food, but still 'exploded' in size until they couldn't walk. Their feathers look awful. On the whole they looked sick and miserable. Just like battery chickens, actually

[romanoderoma]

Dennet wrote a lot about animal perceptions and self consciousness

It's hard to tell if the life they live makes some difference for the individual

It's hard for us humans to fathom it, but is it for them?

We still don't know for sure.

https://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/dennett_anim_csness.htm...

[ornornor]

If in doubt, why not err on the side of caution and just not inflict animals this existence, just in case they might care?

[notreallytrue]

We are not doing it though

What do you do if a snake or a cockroach appears in your house?

What happens if a bear wants to share the same living space you live in?

I understand your position, but the simple fact that we live in a modern World and we are at the top of it "inflicts animals this existence"

I like to not do it on purpose and I don't own a fur, if that's what you are curious about, but I'm not lying to myself believing that mink farming is worse than living in big cities that pollute the environment irreparably

Am I being cautious enough?

I don't think so...

[ornornor]

We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here.

I personally go out of my way to not kill anything. I catch bugs and throw them outside. I move frogs and snails off the road when I get the chance so people or cars don’t step on them. I’ve never faced a bear yet though. But that’s a bit extreme. How many people face bears?

It’s not a competition, because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. Farming animals is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases so why not stop doing it? Same with cities and pollution, it’s not all or nothing. There are more and less damaging ways of building, ways that are a bit less obnoxious than the way we’ve mostly been doing it for the last couple of centuries.

[hombre_fatal]

At least a fur coat lasts longer than the 10 minutes of pleasure that eating meat gives you.

[tharne]

Meat provides a lot of nutrition.

[hombre_fatal]

So does other food.

A fur coat provides a lot of warmth. So does other clothing.

Let's not go down the motte-and-bailey rabbit hole of suggesting our vices are simply utilitarian.

[tharne]

meat isn't a vice. It's a traditional part of the diet of the majority of human civilizations. Stop creating vices just to be against them.

[cmrdporcupine]

Indeed, not only the majority of human civilizations but no evidence of a single paleolithic pre-"civilized" group that didn't consume meat or seafood.

Choosing a vegetarian diet is something we can do now, and is always an ideological or religious choice. It was not a choice for our ancestors, even if they often ate way less of it.

[ornornor]

The way these groups did it and the way we do it aren’t even comparable.

They didn’t keep animals in piss poor conditions where they can’t even turn around in their cages or are so deformed they can’t stand up (battery chickens are engineered that way so their breasts are more meaty for instance)

Seafood eating didn’t involve dragging dozens of kilometers of net across the sea floor destroying everything in its passage to throw most of it away (dead) because we can’t eat it anyway/it sells too cheap.

[ornornor]

Considering how much environmental damage and how much suffering our modern day meat eating generates, it’s not that much of a leap to see it as a vice: it’s unnecessary and does a lot of collateral harm; mostly benefiting the individual who indulges in it at the expense of everyone and everything else. Isn’t that what a vice is?

[romanoderoma]

At what cost?

Fast fashion and cheap and disposable clothes is many times worse than an animal coat that can easily last 80 years.

Reuse is an important part of sustainability.

[ornornor]

It’s not either/or. If we wanted, we could make durable cloth clothing. No need to farm and kill animals for that. Ask your grandparents how long did their clothing last when they were young compared to the junk we get now. It’s not like we don’t know how to weave durable textiles, we just choose not to.

[notreallytrue]

> If we wanted

Who's we though?

I want, you want, everybody say they want them, but then fashion industry makes billions.

And not for the lack of durable clothing

My real leather shoes are 20 years old

My sneaker are less than a year old and already not good enough to walk

The problem is I can't wear leather shoes all the time and even if I buy expensive clothing,they are not durable enough to be on par with the ones my grandfather (he was a tailor) made 50-60 years ago.

The offer is simply not there (except luxury goods, which are usually made with old school materials, that's why they cost so much) and the bulk of the demand is simply made of cheap and affordable sh*t.

On the other hand my girlfriends owns a fur that belonged to here grand-grandmother, it's 60 years old, it still looks brand new.

1 human of the past = 1 fur for life

1 modern human = at least 2 or 3 jackets every season.

You want durable stuff and not pollute the environment with dangerous chemicals?

The old way it's still the best.

> No need to farm and kill animals for that

The pollution already kills a lot lot more of them than the fur industry.

Simply owning a cat is already a threat to ecosystem that compared to it the number of minks killed for their fur is an insignificant number.

[ornornor]

You don’t need meat to get nutrition. It was fine to eat meat when it meant hunting it and eating it once in a while. Not so much anymore when the environmental cost is so high and we eat meat every single day.

[romanoderoma]

At least it provides pleasure

Don't get me wrong, I love vegetables, but meat it's not worse, abuse is.

Like the abuse of avocadoes